Social media has transformed the ways in which fashion and beauty brands interact with consumers, putting them at the center of the digital conversation. The beauty of social media is that it acts as a direct line to different audiences, allowing brands to build relationships, drive sales, and foster long-term loyalty. Today, 77% of small businesses use social media as the primary point of contact with their customers.
However, a vast percentage of these businesses aren’t aware of how to harness their full power. Mindlessly throwing money at ads won’t get you very far. Modern brands that want to thrive must develop a social media strategy that takes a data-driven approach, analyzing their consumers’ behavior and preferences, as well as their back-end performance metrics to see what’s working and what’s not.
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how you can tap into different opportunities beyond visual content to take advantage of the full spectrum of social media.
“Businesses are often among the first to leverage the power of new technology, so it makes sense that, in an increasingly digital business landscape, 77% of small businesses use social media to connect with their customers. In addition to building brand awareness (44%), a significant number of small businesses—41%—also depend on social media as a revenue driver.”
– Forbes Advisor
Community Building
The beauty and fashion industry moves fast, and if you don’t have strong support from a community, it’s easy to get left behind for the next trend. On social media, your community isn’t just a bunch of followers. Rather, it’s a group of like-minded people who share the same passion for your brand, its products, and its values.
While investing time in building a community might seem like a fair bit of work, the payoff can be substantial. Recent studies from Hubspot show that 80% of brands reported increased traffic as a direct result of community building.
Beyond driving traffic, building a community creates advocates for your brand, and what better way to spread that same passion you have for your brand than with a group of loyal ambassadors? As an added bonus, this organic, word-of-mouth marketing can significantly reduce costs of your traditional marketing efforts.
So, how do we go about making community building part of your social media strategy?
1. User-Generated Content
Posting user-generated content (UGC) is one of the best ways to start building a community, as more than 55% of consumers trust this style of content compared to traditional forms of marketing.
Sharing content your users create is an excellent way to show you value them and to get others to engage with your brand.
2. Focus on Solutions
Beyond gaining the attention of a larger audience, building a community means getting a true sense of the problems your customers are facing and finding ways to fix them. Though it’s a much larger beauty brand, Dove can be worth taking notes from in this regard.
The brand consistently launches social media campaigns that address its audience’s pain points, helping women build self-esteem and body confidence. Over the years, this approach has helped them foster an emotional connection with their community.
3. Human Interaction
Real communication makes it easier for your audience to interact with you. More than half of consumers will remain loyal to a brand that provides sincere human interaction. Sure, bots can be great for productivity, but at the end of the day, most consumers want to speak to other people.
If your customers can’t get a hold of you, they’ll likely turn to another brand that keeps its lines of communication open.
One of the easiest ways to open those lines of communication is with Stories. They allow you to engage and converse with your community all at once while providing a behind-the-scenes look at your brand.
4. Customer Service
Many small businesses use traditional forms of communication for customer service, including email, phone, and online chat. However, social media offers even greater advantages, including:
- 24-Hour Open Lines: Customers who aren’t able to get ahold of you during your regular business hours using traditional lines of communication can take advantage of the 24/7 availability of social media.
- Consumer Convenience: Most consumers are on social media daily, and a social media notification from a channel they like is more likely to catch their attention than one of the hundreds of texts or emails they’re bombarded with each day.
- Reputation Management: When you actively monitor and respond to both positive and negative comments on your social media platforms, you can stay ahead of the competition. In fact, most social platforms consider direct messages favorably or as a sign of engagement.
So, as a growing brand, how do we take advantage of these customer service benefits?
Here are a few strategies to consider:
- Be Timely With Responses – Around 42% of consumers expect responses to their inquiries in an hour or less. While larger brands may assign certain employees to manage responses on social media, many small businesses don’t have that luxury.
- To make things easier, we recommend using tools like Content Studio and Pallyy to track messages and mentions on your various social media platforms, so you can craft prompt, appropriate responses all in one place.
- Address Complaints Privately – It’s best to resolve customer complaints via direct message rather than having a public discussion, as you don’t want to bring attention to a customer’s negative comment. Offer support by sending these customers messages to let them know you’re happy to help them find a resolution via phone, email, or direct message.
- Develop Customer Relationship Management Guidelines – Your staff should have a set of instructions that tells them how to deal with customers on social media. With guidelines in place, you provide much more consistency. As a result, it’s easier to analyze your customer service strategies and find ways to improve.
- Have a template for dealing with common issues or create standardized greetings that give customers more uniform responses to their questions and complaints.
Content Diversity
Algorithms favor variety, which is why it’s important to begin diversifying your content strategy. Beyond the algorithm, your followers will find a diverse mix of content more interesting than seeing a regurgitation of the same visuals over and over.
But what does content diversity even look like?
Facebook and Instagram allow for a range of content formats, including Reels, Carousels, Stories, Polls, and Lives. Many brands take the daily approach, using one format each day so that by the end of the week they have a diverse feed.
Stories, Lives, and Polls are great for stimulating engagement. Even something as simple as a “Yes or No” or “This or That” Poll can elicit interaction from your followers.
Creating varied content doesn’t need to be costly. In fact, there are many budget-friendly approaches you can take to stay on your social media game:
- Repurposing Existing Content: Slicing up podcasts for smaller video snippets or converting long-form blogs into short posts is a great way to maximize the content you already have.
- Crowdsource Your Content: Encourage your followers to share photos and videos of them using or wearing your products via hashtags and repurpose them as authentic UGC.
- Go Live: If you’re looking for inexpensive yet highly effective content, you might consider going live. From behind-the-scenes product development to a small workplace showcase, there are endless possibilities for livestreams.
Measuring Success
While you can chase goals or objectives with a strong social media strategy, there’s no way to know if you’re getting close to those goals if you’re not measuring your success. Social media analytics are key in this regard, and luckily, just about every platform offers a native analytics tool.
Why are Analytics and Insights SO Important?
There are several key benefits of keeping an eye on your social media analytics, some of the most significant of which include:
- Trendspotting: See what trends are up and coming before they hit the mainstream. With social media analytics, you can see what topics your audience is talking about and what types of ads interest them most.
- Value Perception: There are several social listening tools you can use to monitor your brand’s value perception, which is essentially your customers’ overall opinion of your products and services. Doing so can help guide your content so that you showcase products that touch on key pain points.
- Goal Setting: Creating actionable goals starts with seeing how your channels and content are performing now. If your analytics reports show that your page is gaining 20 new followers each week, a goal of gaining 10,000 in a quarter probably isn’t realistic. However, it may be possible to double that goal to 40 followers per week.
While the built-in analytics reports found on most social media platforms offer insightful data, they often aren’t as in-depth as third-party analytics platforms that are built with the sole focus of providing insight.
Minter.io is one of our favorite tools for social media analytics, as it offers robust metrics and performance analytics across a wide range of platforms, so you can aggregate your data all in one place.
DIY Vs. Outsourcing
It’s clear that making the most of social media requires quite a bit of manpower. Unfortunately, not every brand has the resources to dedicate a team, let alone a single employee, to social media.
This predicament begs the question, is it better to keep your social media strategy in-house or outsource it to a digital marketing agency?
There are a few advantages to having a DIY social media strategy. You get cultural clarity, direct communication, and more involvement, which can ultimately lead to better strategic planning in other facets of your business.
However, the average employee won’t have the same level of expertise as someone who’s at the heart of social media. Plus, when you allocate a non-expert’s time and effort into social media, you lose focus on the core of your business, often with little to show for it.
The other option is outsourcing your social media marketing to an agency. While cost and lack of authenticity are often a concern for small business owners who go this route, professional social media marketers can bring the necessary tools, time, expertise, and market insights into the fold to help you create the most effective strategies.
From there, you can collaborate with a hired agency on your campaigns to ensure they’re authentic to your brand and voice, giving you the best of both worlds.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Let’s take a look at a few brands in the fashion and beauty industry who are making the most of social media.
Glossier – User Generated Content (UGC)
Founded in 2014, Glossier has kept its mission simple — create beauty products that enhance natural beauty and celebrate individuality. From the start, the brand decided to take a community approach, creating a platform to leverage user-generated content.
Taking a look at Glossier’s Instagram, you’ll see plenty of UGC with hashtags the brand has used to help integrate content from its followers, such as #GlossierPink and #GlossierRep. It’s an excellent example of a brand that consistently shows love to its customers.
Sephora – Polls
Sephora uses polls to engage its followers on Instagram relatively often, whether building hype around a new product launch or getting feedback on new products.
In this example, they used their story to build suspense for their upcoming Digital Event.
Conclusion
Social media offers a treasure trove of opportunities beyond captivating visuals. By implementing these strategies you’re sure to maximize your brand’s social media impact:
- Build a loyal community: Foster genuine connections with your audience through consistent engagement.
- Prioritize user-generated content (UGC): Encourage and showcase content created by your customers to build authenticity.
- Address customer concerns: Respond promptly and empathetically to inquiries and complaints.
- Diversify your content strategy: Offer a mix of formats (e.g., text, images, videos, stories) to cater to different preferences.
- Leverage analytics: Track and measure the performance of your social media campaigns to identify areas for improvement.
- Consider outsourcing: Partner with a digital marketing agency to streamline social media management and maximize ROI.
